Interchange

by Daniel M. Bensen

  Anne let out a laugh. Speaking of fooling ourselves. Again, the words were there in her brain. But what should she tell him? How did Anne feel? She looked inside herself, and it was just a huge mess.

  Daisuke shouldn’t have to deal with her bullshit. What had he said about telling people what they want to hear? “It’s okay, Dice,” she said, and smiled. It was like pushing modeling clay around. Just shapes. “I’m happy with you.”

  “You’re lying.” Daisuke put his hand over hers. “I love you,” he said. “I’m sorry I brought you here.”

  Anne looked into his eyes and knew he was telling the truth. And what good did that knowledge do? Why ever develop people skills at all, if all you learned with them were things you didn’t want to know? Anne’s nose was suddenly full of snot. “Oh shit,” she sniffed. Stupid animal body. Press the right button and it starts crying.

  “I love you, but you’re wrong.” Daisuke still hadn’t taken his hand away. It was warm and heavy. “Just because people are part of nature, that doesn’t mean we don’t…there isn’t….” His eyes narrowed. “Sekinin ya gimu to iu imi nai tte itteiru wake ja nainda. We still have responsibilities and duties.”

  “Duties like trying to make me happy? It’s so exhausting, Daisuke.” Crap. She shouldn’t have said that. But Anne felt like she would explode if she kept all this inside her.

  Or maybe implode. Daisuke’s expression was like a collapsing star in her gut.

  “I’m sorry. It was a mistake to bring you here.” He stood, removing his hand from hers. “But I am here. I have responsibilities and duties. If I ignore them, I am like a clever animal. I will be evil, just like you said.”

  He turned then, and walked away to join the expedition up the mountain.

  Alone, Anne could finally cry. Once she was done, she understood that she couldn’t go home, but she couldn’t stay here. The only choice left was to stop Farhad by any means necessary.

  She still had such a long way to go, but now at least now it was forward. Up that mountain.

  When Anne left the caravan, she dutifully locked its doors behind her.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Lightning and the Tree

  Anne stood alone at the base of the Howling Mountain, looking up.

  From a distance, it had looked like a cone or pyramid. Closer up, its surface had appeared quilted. Now, it was clear that the quilting wasn’t a surface feature. The ‘pyramid’ was actually composed of giant, blobby lumps, like a pile of melting ice-cream scoops.

  It was clearly, unmistakably biological, but no elephant, whale, or redwood tree could contain a tenth of the mass Anne was seeing. The Howling Mountain might outweigh even Pando the aspen grove, Earth’s heaviest single organism. But then the mountain was also too small. Australia’s Uluru would dwarf this uncomfortable, in-between thing.

  Farhad and the others had a head start in the ATV, although now that she looked more closely at the terrain, the vehicle might actually slow them down. Anne had a chance of beating them to the wormhole and…she’d figure that out later. Now, she walked around the perimeter so the party of climbers wouldn’t see her coming. So she wouldn’t see them. Daisuke was with them, protecting those—

  She closed her eyes. No. If Anne wanted to be angry at people, she could have stayed on Earth. Now it was just time to look at the mountain.

  Look. It’s the mountain.

  From this close, its taper looked more like a trick of perspective than its true shape. As if Anne were looking at a rectangle, an obelisk, a road leading to the stars.

  The peak was shrouded in mist, but its lower slopes were covered in soil and plant life of various types. Orange wedges of sierpinski-grass, dark green spirals, frost-colored domes, indigo fans like giant bracken fungi, floppy strips like giant dark ribbons, and the brown fur-like plants of the Toymaker biome.

  Oh, the toymakers. Anne’s breath hitched. She sobbed, vision blurring. Well, why not cry here? There was nobody left around her to care. The mountain didn’t. It just waited beyond the veil of tears.

  Anne blinked. Squinted. Wiped the tears away and then realized that their blur had revealed the pattern. She unfocused her eyes, the way she had in the Dorado forest, letting the alien plants on the mountainside turn into abstract blotches of color.

  And the colors made a pattern.

  Anne remembered the mountains around Imsame, as the valley had once been. Warring biomes carved out territories for themselves, claiming gullies and crags as they poisoned the ground for the life of other planets. There were territories like that here too, except they were tiny. Narrow. And the stripes of color didn’t follow the shape of the ground under them.

  Toymaker plants liked high elevations, and should have formed a cap on the pyramid. Instead, the brown hair-grass trees snaked up the slope in a pair of irregular lines, paralleling a row of those dark ribbons. To the left of that, a broad wedge of sierpinski-grass narrowed to a meter-wide band of coiling orange bramble. It looked like the path a river made to the sea, widening into a delta. Was Anne looking at a pattern of seed dispersal? But what would be spitting out Dorado-biome seeds from the peak? The wormhole? Except the wormhole was supposed to lead to space.

  The skin on Anne’s arms prickled under her parka. Coatls actively engineered the shapes of their plant life. Cavaliers did, too, and yes, there was the dark green of their ammonite-grass. Anne backed away, trying to get a better angle…yes. When looked at from the side, it was easy to see how those dark green places had been terraced.

  The cavaliers had built stairs onto the Howling Mountain. The coatls had clipped together a viny ladder that they could climb. The toymakers had their paths, too, but how could the little wheeled creatures climb them? If Anne could figure that out, she might be able to beat Farhad’s party to the peak.

  Except now that she traced them with her eyes, none of the paths actually seemed to lead there.

  Anne turned and ran, kicking through snow and sierpinski, gaining perspective. When she judged she had enough, she turned and looked again at the mountain. Yes, those stripes of vegetation thinned as they climbed. They converged faster than the shape of the mountain required, so that they would meet at a point about halfway up, just below the bottom of the mist layer. Was that a hint of something in there? Something darker and more complicated than the surface of the mountain?

  Who cared about beating Farhad to the top? She could beat him to what was actually important.

  Anne clenched her hands in their gloves. This was what she needed. No distractions. No people. Just organisms going about their business and Anne watching over them, trying to figure out what was going on.

  Because there was something going on. Those paths of vegetation looked wrong, groomed, artificial, pasted on top of something else.

  Something else, which had something to do with those dark ribbons. They were everywhere on the mountain, underlying the sierpinski and nautilus-grasses, snaking like water around the white domes, bracketed by toymaker plants like the water in an irrigation channel. At the base of the mountain, ribbons draped like the fringe on a homespun skirt.

  Anne headed toward the tip of a ribbon. It was the leaden color of the sky before a bad storm, about the width of her body and the thickness of her little finger, bifurcated at the end like the tongue of a snake.

  Anne didn’t touch it. Instead she found a patch of rock upslope and jumped onto it. Rock crunched under her boots as she followed the ribbon up the slope. As Anne climbed, she saw knobs of harder material growing on its surface, the color and texture of foamed cement. The color and texture of the rock of the mountain, in fact. Hmm.

  The knobs on the ribbon grew larger and more numerous as Anne walked uphill, until they fused together into a stiff, round sleeve. The sleeve didn’t grow upward like a tree would have, but stuck straight out from the mountain, a squished tube more than a meter across. Th
e ribbon ran into this sleeve, or rather, it flopped limply out of it, the rubbery extension of some larger organism growing underground. And there was another sleeve, angling out of the mountainside to form a Y shape with the first. Anne thought of the end of the ribbon, with its similar bifurcation.

  Anne imagined this ribbon contracting, thickening, developing a rocky coat, its forked tip growing into new ribbons as it fused with the mountain’s skin.

  She squinted up the slope, superimposing the gullies and crags she saw with the ice-cream-pile shape of the mountain in general. Yes. The two sleeves Anne had found were at the tip of a mound of outthrust rock. Farther uphill, there was another mound, with its own pair of sleeves. She looked sideways, along the slope. It was hard to see because of the plants in the way, but it looked like the ground dipped, then bulged out again. Another pair of mounds, each tipped with a pair of sleeves of its own.

  The ice-cream scoops were branches. Limbs. Trunks joining to form mightier trunks, growing out from the heart of the organism they called the Howling Mountain.

  “Ha.” The word puffed into fog. Anne was standing on a giant plant, its leaves draping down over petrified bark and the forests of epiphytes that clung to it. A tree shaped like a pile of ice-cream.

  Did this hypothesis cast any light on those other plants? Anne looked down the slope and up, following the multicolored trails of the different biomes. They still looked artificial, shooting straight up to a horizontal cleft in the rock right at the edge of the mist.

  Except that wasn’t exactly rock, was it? The cleft was a larger version of the little gully across the slope from the neighboring branch-mounds. It must be where two huge branches came together, a tree crotch the size of a subway station. And there was definitely something large growing up there.

  Why would plants from all these biomes be growing here? Because the coatls and toymakers and cavaliers had brought them. And why would they do that? Why did the toymakers make these periodic migrations to the Howling Mountain? And follow paths up to that point where two big branch-lumps came together?

  “There’s something up there that they want,” Anne said, and shivered. It wasn’t just the cold, it was the way her words dissolved uselessly in the air, with nobody to hear them.

  Was it dangerous, whatever was up there? Would Daisuke be all right when he reached it?

  The thought brought a painful jolt with it. Would the mountain be all right? No, it wouldn’t be, and between this unique, ancient organism and one particular Japanese man, it was obvious which she had to choose.

  It had to be obvious. Why wasn’t it obvious?

  Anne’s breath ghosted through her teeth. “So what the hell am I supposed to do?” she asked the flank of the mountain. The only answer it made was to crunch beneath Anne’s boots as she climbed.

  It was the act of long habit to check the ground before she sat. You never knew what snakes or spiders might be waiting there to inject your ankles with venom. So Anne swung her leg out in an arc and scraped her sturdy boot across the mountainside.

  Rock crumbled like old concrete, linguipods leaped from toymaker grass like striped, overly-active snails. The dull gray surface of the ribbon twitched.

  Understanding came like a bolt of lightning. Like lightning, a dozen little questing branches of inquiry had been spreading from Anne’s brain into the mountain. She’d barely been aware of them, those questions, connections, hypotheses comparing one imaginary world to another, questing for that first brush against the real world. Then, with the brush of a boot against a plant, a path to understanding opened and fire flooded through.

  The rock. The ribbon. The cave in the mist. Farhad and Daisuke climbing the other face of the mountain. The point of it all! Toymakers. Their plants growing right here. Their little wheels, which could not possibly roll them up a slope like this. The ribbons could move!

  Anne pounced on the ribbon and grasped its edge with both hands.

  It felt like grabbing hold of the conveyor belt at an airport baggage carousel. Rubbery tissue jerked in her grip. The smooth surface crinkled like a skeptic’s forehead. Rocks and grass hissed, and the entire dark length of the thing slurped up the mountain, dragging Anne with it.

  ***

  “Hey, Daisuke. Come over to my side of the mountain.”

  Daisuke stared down at his walkie-talkie, then back at the line of people straggling up the mountain behind him.

  The slope was gentle, and in places seemed almost to have been carved into stairs. Daisuke didn’t have to worry about someone having heart palpitations or falling into a crevasse, so he was able to focus on the next step. The dark green swirls growing over ground like old coral. The crunch under his boots and the breathing of his companions. The labor of his lungs and the burning of his calf muscles. He’d tried not to think about how he’d betrayed Anne, and whatever he was going to do next.

  “Anne,” he whispered into the microphone, “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, me too. I was a jerk because I didn’t know what was going to happen, or more precisely because I knew something bad was going to happen, but now….”

  It was good to hear her babble again. Daisuke waited for her to pause for breath. “What happened? Are you all right?”

  “Yes. I came to a realization. Come to my side of the mountain and you’ll see why.”

  “Where? What side?”

  “Remember when we thought the mountain was a pyramid? It still is, just it’s a pyramid made of ice-cream scoops.”

  Daisuke had very little idea what she was talking about. That was usually a good sign. “You mean the mountain has four sides?”

  “Yes, but each face is made of the ossified skin of twigs that branch off one of four big limbs. I’m at the…what do you call it…the apical meristem of the right-hand branch of the south-west limb. What about you?”

  Daisuke shook his head. Apical what? What about branches? “I’m halfway up, I think. I’m just below the clouds. There is a…” – what was ‘seam’ in English? “There is a line around the middle of the mountain, like a belt.”

  “The seam where the four equatorial trunks meet the apical trunk, yes. Hm.”

  “Yes?”

  “There ought to be a trunk at the foot of the mountain as well. Squashed down small where we can’t see it?” A pause. Daisuke could almost hear her mental gears shift. “Anyway. You must be as high as me, then. Good hiking, Dice. If you walked, then you probably used the crevices between mounds. Going up the cavaliers’ stairs, right? You must be in the crotch between the two main branches of the north-east limb right now.”

  Daisuke looked left and right. “There are big mounds on either side of me. Is that right?”

  “Exactly right,” she crowed. “Climb up the one on your left. I’ll tell you how.”

  That would be much harder than Daisuke’s climb so far. He didn’t hesitate.

  His jump didn’t take him as far as it would have in normal gravity, but Daisuke spread his arms and legs and clung like a spider climbing an egg. His walkie-talkie squawked, but he didn’t pause. He would explain to Farhad and the others when he reached the top.

  He saw Anne’s boots first. Anne was standing on top of the mound, in front of a pair of the limp, lead-colored ribbon-plants that seemed to characterize this mountain.

  “You had to just fling yourself up here, didn’t you?” she said. “You couldn’t wait for me to tell you how to ride the ribbon-trees.”

  “What?” panted Daisuke. “I’m sorry.”

  “You should be. This is exactly what – no. Later. I’m sorry too, Dice.” She knelt, holding a hand out for him to grab. “First, let me show you what I was wrong about. It’s big.”

  ***

  Anne stood on the mountain with Daisuke and showed him the lands they had passed through. The Toymaker Mountains, blue in the distance. The iridescent shimmer of t
he glasslands. The rolling, forest-green hills of the Cavalier biome. And last, closest, the Dorado biome. It was orange again.

  “Look!” she said. “Don’t you see what it means? Use your binoculars, Dice. Look at the Dorado trees!”

  Because there the trees were. Canopies of living money, rebuilt – they must have been! – by the creatures that valued them.

  Daisuke’s brows lowered over the eyepieces. “They are shorter and closer to each other than before. They look more like cones. Pine tree shape?”

  “Good eye! I’m thinking it’s a better shape for snowfall. Maybe the Dorado Planet has seasons.” Her words came faster. “The closest thing I can think of on Earth is the blooms you get after rain in the desert or the regrowth after a periodic forest fire. Eucalyptus trees produce fruits that have to burn in order to release their seeds. Of course, you also have deciduous trees that lose all their leaves once a year, and or in the case of bamboos, just set seed and die all at once.”

  Living things died, and suffered, and raged against fate, but the wheel spun on.

  God, I’ve been stupid. No. That wasn’t quite it. More fundamentally, Anne had been arrogant. She’d thought she’d understood this wild and complex system of a forest. She’d reduced the Dorado biome to fit into her head, then wept when it got so small. She’d been wrong, and that should be glorious.

  She remembered herself, standing in the forest right before it fell apart. She remembered her rage, her hopeless, all-directions war. That poor woman, she thought. She ripped herself apart. Anne had wasted so much time on anger. No point in being angry about that though. “I’m willing to bet this reassembly is something the forest just does occasionally. Maybe this is how the trees shuffle genetic material around. And it’s not close to being done. Look at all the blue you can see. Construction activity!”

  “Do you think the wormhole is still missing? Has it reappeared?”

  “I couldn’t tell. We’ll need to go down there and check after, uh.” Anne coughed. “We stop Farhad and Moon.”